Социальная история Англии ХIV-XVII вв. - Татьяна Мосолкина

Processes that took place in craft guilds show that expropriation of the immediate producer and the formation of the wage labour market in the town had begun long before mass peasants’ dispossession of land in the 16th century. Complaints of guilds’ craftsmen that they were being ruined, turning into tramps and paupers show that there was a deep stratification inside the guild already in the 14th century. It seems that enclosures in the English village of the 16th century were connected not so much with the development of Flanders’ manufactory as with the establishment of new forms of cloth production in England itself, all the more so as in the end of the 14th century it was forbidden to export unfinished cloth. Domination of cloth export over wool export by the middle of the 15th century proves that there was the growth of demand for raw materials in England and this was the reason that caused mass enclosures since the end of the 15th century.

Rapid development of entrepreneurship could not but affect social psychology of medieval townspeople. Especially clearly it was manifested in towns with wide international links. Merchants and craftsmen meeting people from other countries learned to perceive themselves not only as citizens of a town (they had never forgot about that) but as English people as opposed to foreigners. With the expansion of trade and production, their confidence and pride for their achievements were also growing. This was expressed in building stone houses, in their wish to keep up with feudal lords in the luxury of their clothing, in pompous tombstone and so on.

At the given period the ideas about a social position of the woman began to change. Their participation in external trade activity, financial operations and disposal of inheritance shows the growth of their economic and legal independence. Certainly, we cannot compare the burghership of a small town somewhere in the hinterland and a big port like London, Bristol or Southampton. Property and social stratification, naturally, took place quicker in such urban communities where big capital was involved into trade.

At the end of the period under review, a small country, England, was becoming, first, the centre of world maritime trade and then the centre of the empire. In the 17th century, the pattern of thoughts and life habits both in the town and village were deeply affected by overseas countries. Eastern goods brought into England by merchants of various companies became ordinary decorations in many town and country mansions. Passion for collecting different things turned some mansions of the nobility into a kind of museums. Nevertheless, despite huge changes taken place in the life of England from the 14th to the 17th century only an insignificant part of country dwellers had an idea of urban way of life. The greater part of England’s population continued to maintain medieval customs and traditions until the Industrial Revolution.

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